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the year in reading
Once again: a new year, time to crunch the numbers on the reading log. General trend?: reading fewer books but enjoying the ones I read more. There are a good half-dozen books on this year's list that I spent a long, intimate time with, filling dozens of index cards with crabbed handwriting and generally hastening my decline into obsessive-compulsive insanity.
Anyway, the numbers:
Total number of books I read last year: 35 (down 23 [!] from 2004)
Novels / novellas: 5 (down four)
Collections of poetry: 6 (down sixteen [!])
Collections of short stories: 1 (+1)
Books on science / technology: 2 (same as last year)
Books on religion: 8 (+8)
Graphic novels / comics anthologies: 9 (+4)
Books of literary or cultural criticism: 1 (-5)
Books on art / architecture / music: 2 (-1)
Essays / memoir: 0 (-4)
History: 0 (-2)
Authors I read in 2005 who have written at least one book I read prior to 2005: 10 (Karen Armstrong, Christine Hume, Rae Armantrout, Craig Thompson, David Toop, Alan Moore, Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, Charles Bernstein, and Ryan McGinness)
Books I read in 2005 that I read at least once prior to 2005: 3 ( Valis, by Philip K. Dick, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons)
High points: looking at the numbers above reveals a real increase in my interest in books on religion, and these are indeed the books that I spent the most time with and made my most careful notations on. (This interest traces definitively back to a single distinct experience which some of you have heard me talk about.) Unsurprisingly, then, many of my favorite books that I read this year come from that field. I enjoyed Elaine Pagels' Gnostic Gospels and Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, both rightfully considered definitive texts on their respective topics, but I probably got more out of Stephen Katz's deeply fascinating Mysticism and Language anthology and Philip K. Dick's provocative, loopy In Pursuit of Valis : Selections from the Exegesis.
Outside of the world of religion? The essays in Johanna Drucker's great collection Figuring the Word : Essays on Books, Writing and Visual Poetics changed the path of the writing I produced this year more than anything else I read, and the "image/text" Vas: An Opera in Flatland, produced collaboratively by Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell, convinced me that there maybe is still life in the novel after all. Finally, reading the first two manga that comprise Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira saga revealed to me just how deeply the story is compromised by the abridged, compressed version found in the movie.
What did you read this year that you enjoyed? Labels: book_commentary |
